books, recipes, parenting & other things

Stuff we’ve tried recently

♠ Some (fairly) locally grown coffee – the Espresso Blend from Zeta’s Coffee, which is grown in the Tweed Valley. We bought it through Food Connect. I really liked this coffee, but I don’t think I know enough about coffee to describe why. It was warm and round and mellow? I don’t know. It was good, and we definitely prefer it to the packets of Vittoria that we get from the supermarket. Next time we’re going to try a bag of their Single Origin.

♠ We got a copy of Dominion, which is a hugely popular card based game – you have a set of cards, and you play around exchanging and buying things, and the aim is to build up your dominion, buying cards that represent estates and duchys and provinces. It’s a lot of fun, can be played by two people, and the variety of the cards means that the game changes a fair bit depending on how you decide to set it up. In fact, the set up and the re-sorting of the cards after each game is the only painful factor. It’s the first card based game I’ve played, and I think I’m a fan.

♠ We also bought Pandemic, which is a board game played co-operatively with between 2 to 4 people – you have to work together to prevent the spread of several diseases over the world, and try and make cures and eradicate disease. We’ve only played it once so far, and we were thrashed by the game. It’s depressing, being thrashed by a game. But I’m looking forward to playing again.

♠ Another board game from my board game buying SPREE – Castle Panic! has the best name of the games I bought. It has a similar vibe to Pandemic, in that you’re working in a team against the monsters who are trying to overrun your castle. It says “Ages 10+” on the box, and it’s appropriately easier and more child friendly than Pandemic. In the interests of full disclosure, we also would have been beaten by the game if we hadn’t blatantly cheated – we’d just been beaten by Pandemic and by god, we weren’t letting it happen again. In our defence – it was late at night? We don’t play many board games? Oh, ok, there’s no defence. But we felt better having beaten the monsters back. Even if we hadn’t done so with honour.

♠ We went to a house concert by some folk artists that we really enjoyed – Jonny Dyer and Vicki Swan – and we’ve been listening to their CD, Gleowien. It’s full on British folk – pipes and whistles – with a bit of a twist, because Vicki Swan plays a Swedish instrument called a nyckelharpa. If you like folk, you’d enjoy it – but even the husband, who’s not such a folk fan, enjoys it for the musicianship. Musicianship? You know – excellent playing of the instruments.

♠ Kenilworth probiotic honey yoghurt, which we bought when driving through on the Easter weekend (although I think it’s also stocked at Woolworths, but that’s not as fun as buying it direct). Amazing stuff. All honey-ish and creamy and generally delicious.